


Epistemology

by kelly_chambliss



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-09
Packaged: 2017-11-15 23:51:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelly_chambliss/pseuds/kelly_chambliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chakotay sits in a bar and thinks about Janeway.</p><p>Begun in 2000, finished and posted in January, 2007.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epistemology

**Author's Note:**

> Back in 1999, I fell in love with the character of Captain Kathryn Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager. On the day I did a web search of her name, I changed my life forever, because one of the hits I got was for something called "The JetC Index." It was fanfic, all sorts of fanfic, glorious fanfic, terrible fanfic, explicit fanfic. I was hooked. I read voraciously for some weeks and then finally decided to try my hand at writing a story of my own.
> 
> I ended up writing probably a couple dozen VOY fics between 1999 and 2002 or so, with another few written a bit later. All are Janeway-centric. The stories are scattered in various places, so I thought I might as well gather them all here at A03.
> 
> I started "Epistemology" sometime in 2000, but the story didn't go anywhere, and it languished unfinished on my hard-drive until January of 2007, when I decided to dust it off and post it to ASCEM for old times' sake. It needed another draft or three, but I'd lost my VOY energy.
> 
> Historical Background: This story takes place on Voyager, still in the Delta Quadrant, not long after the events of "Equinox" (where Janeway turns into Captain Ahab and uses torture, among other things, to hunt down the rogue Captain Ransom) and the events of "Good Shepherd," in which she shrugs off the Ahab mantle and tries to redeem some of the misfit members of her crew/flock. Noah Lessing is the man Janeway tortures in "Equinox," threatening to let him die unless he tells her where Captain Ransom is hiding. Billy Telfer and Mortimer Harron are the oddball crewmen she tries to save by taking them on an away mission in "Good Shepherd." Michael Sullivan is the hologram that Janeway supposedly fell in love with during the unspeakably gruesome and embarrassing episode "Fair Haven." Chakotay is. . .well, Chakotay.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Chakotay sat in the booth farthest from the computer arch. Some of the younger ensigns from Engineering had lowered the lights until the gloom was almost impenetrable, which suited their First Officer just fine.

The holodeck was reserved twice a week for one of the public-access bar programs. For years, it had mostly been Sandrine's. Lately, it had been Fair Haven and Sullivan's pub, but tonight, it was Sandrine's again.

Chakotay rarely wanted a bar program at all, but when he did, he preferred Sandrine's. If some people thought that he disliked Sullivan's because he didn't want to watch Captain Janeway flirt with her paramour Michael, he was content to let them think it. But he didn't really give a damn about Michael or what Kathryn did with him. Michael was a hologram, for fuck's sake.

No, he preferred Sandrine's because, when he wanted to be in a bar, he wanted the sort of bar that Sandrine's was. And that Sullivan's wasn't. Sullivan's wasn't a bar at all, really. It was a community center. Rings and wrestling and philosophizing and people drinking tea.

Sandrine's was where you went to drink things other than tea. And to be alone. It wasn't the aloneness of anonymity, obviously. Who could be anonymous on a floating zoo in space? But sometimes even on Voyager, you could find that isolation unique to the spaces of a bar -- where you were alone within the walls of the booths and alone outside the edges of the dim pools of candlelight and alone even when you were sitting on a stool with another person only centimeters from your elbow.

Chakotay wanted that sort of aloneness when he needed to think. But not think too much at once. Not if the thinking was the sort that was going to make you suck in your breath when you hit a bad spot, a feeling like air on a broken tooth. Not if the thinking was the sort that became too much all of a sudden, so that you had to stand up abruptly and go distract yourself by watching a game of pool.

And that was the sort of thinking he had to do.

Or would do, later. For the moment, he allowed himself the diversion of watching crewmen Mortimer Harron and Billy Telfer drink beer at a nearby table. Now _there_ was a pair. A nut job and a hypochondriac. As the officer in charge of personnel, Chakotay had long ago decided to leave the two of them alone. Let them be misfits, if they wanted to. They seemed happiest that way. Not everyone needed to part of a community.

But of course, that hadn't been good enough for Kathryn. She couldn't rest until she'd tried to save their raggedy asses by dragging them on an away mission. Yet another one of her great ideas. Harron had practically gotten them all killed.

Chakotay eyed the two men narrowly. Telfer was harmless -- pathetic,but harmless. Harron, though. . . not only was he a belligerent loner, but he was a belligerent loner who was as close to a sociopath as made no difference. And yet here he was, sitting almost silently with poor Telfer. "Mort's been making more of an effort to socialize, Commander," Neelix had reported last week. "He's even gone to the holodeck once or twice. I think it's helping him."

Chakotay watched as Harron tilted his head back and chugged beer. Helping him? Was it? Not if tonight's awkward silences and even more awkward conversation were any indication. The whole thing looked pretty damn painful. If Chakotay were any judge, it wouldn't be long before Harron holed up again for good. Good for everyone else, anyway.

"Have you ever been here before?" Telfer was asking.

Harron looked around and didn't answer until his silence had become rudeness. "Nah." He jerked his head in Chakotay's direction. "What's _he_ doing here?"

"The Commander? Um. . .I don't know. Drinking?" Telfer laughed nervously. "Why?"

"I thought he was always slurping around after the Captain."

Telfer took a gulp from his beer, looking even more nervous. "What do you mean? Sure, he's with her sometimes, I guess. He _is_ the First Officer."

"I thought she was fucking him."

Telfer choked. "God, what's the matter with you? Will you keep it down? I mean, come on. . .he's sitting right there."

"Are you saying the Captain's _not_ fucking the Commander?"

"No! Yes! I mean, I don't. . .Jesus, Harron. Stop it, will you?"

Chakotay stood, slowly, and stepped over to the table. "You have a question, crewman?"

Telfer got up, his chair scraping sharply. "No, Commander, sorry. We were just leaving, weren't we, Harron? I'm sorry, Commander. Really."

Harron looked at Chakotay, letting his gaze hold long enough for its insolence to be clear. "Yeah," he said finally. "Sorry."

Chakotay watched the two men leave the holodeck and then returned to his booth. He wouldn't put them on report; that was just the sort of self-arranged persecution Harron wanted. Besides, Harron was right.

The Captain _was_ fucking the Commander.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"Are you busy for dinner tonight, Chakotay? My quarters, 1900 hours?"

They had been leaving the conference room earlier that afternoon. It was one month after the destruction of the Equinox, and he was still startled that Kathryn's voice could sound so normal, that she herself could act so normal. Only a month ago, he'd stood and watched her torture that Equinox crewman, Lessing, had stood and watched and known beyond any doubt that she was planning to let the man die.

"I do not know her," he told himself later. "I have never known her." He said the words aloud in his quarters, because only by hearing their hard spoken edges could he take in their meaning. He'd been almost as shocked by his ignorance as by her behavior. How could he have worked with her and lived with her for so long and not have realized what she was capable of? What she _had_ to be capable of, if she wanted to keep them all alive year after year?

But it was wrong. . .what she had done was wrong. "I won't let you cross that line again," he'd told her, after Lessing. Janeway had relieved him of duty then, as he'd known she would. She had to -- it was mutiny, or as good as. But he still told himself he'd taken a courageous stand. She'd been wrong. She'd gone too far . . .

Far enough to fuck you, he reminded himself bitterly. In the early days of their attraction, they'd spent so much time worrying about command fraternization and about the dangers of maintaining a personal relationship when everyone's lives depended on their professional one. He'd even thought for a while that she didn't really want him at all, that she was relieved to be able to hide behind protocol.

But then, one night on short leave, she'd invited him to a local bar and there, very deliberately, she had seduced him, using her musky voice and the touch of her long, thin fingers on the back of his hand until he was so aroused he could barely speak. 

"Can we get a room?" he had gasped finally. 

"Upstairs," she said, placing a flat piece of metal on the table between them. "They use keys here. Quaint, isn't it?"

Obviously she'd been awfully damned sure of him, but he didn't give that a thought then. Then, he just followed her blindly up the stairs to the room she'd already reserved, followed her until they had been safe in the dark and quiet and he could forget that he had ever heard the words "protocol" or "captain" or even "Voyager."

They had fucked regularly after that, and it had been exhilarating and intense and sometimes rough and sometimes tender. It was never really a "relationship" and it had probably never been love, but he hadn't cared, because it had been enough. She had been enough.

Until the Equinox. They hadn't really spoken much since then, except about routine things. She was courteous but distant, and it was hard to remember that he'd even touched her, let alone ever lay twisted against her naked body in "the rank sweat of an enseamed bed" -- or whatever that line was.

Yet now here she was, inviting him to dinner the way she always had. At 1900 hours.

"1900 hours," Chakotay repeated. "I should be able to make it. Captain."

If she felt his use of her rank, she didn't indicate it. She just smiled and touched his shoulder. "See you then."

He watched her walk away, not asking himself why he had agreed to go.

At 1900 hours he'd shown up at her door, and the evening had been so typical, so normal, so exactly the way things had been before the Equinox that he could almost make himself believe they were caught in one of those time loops, where you just repeated the past over and over again. He and Kathryn had eaten and drunk a bottle of wine and talked vaguely of inventories and personnel rosters and shore leave rotations.

And then they had fucked. No discussion, no conscious decision. She'd just stood and looked at him, and then somehow they were naked on the floor and he was pinning her wrists above her head and biting her breast and fucking her so hard and she was saying yes yes yes -- yes, she said, yes. Yes. Yes.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"Ze bar program, she go off-line soon, Commander, no?" It was Sandrine, standing next to Chakotay's booth with a rag in her hand, smiling at him in her unmistakable, programmed-by-Tom-Paris way.

"You're right, Sandrine; I'd better be going," Chakotay finished his beer and stood up. He hadn't realized it was so late; he'd been here for hours, ever since he'd pulled on his clothes and silently left Kathryn's quarters.

He'd come to Sandrine's to do some hard thinking, the sort that makes your mind give like a rotten fruit if you push it too hard. He'd come to think, but he hadn't. He hadn't needed to, because he already knew what there was to know.

He knew that he had always known Kathryn, had always known what she was capable of. Hell, he'd _relied_ on what she was capable of -- relied on it to keep himself and everyone else alive. He'd been _glad_ to know it -- glad to know that she would do the things he wouldn't have to do. . .

He knew what she was capable of and knew that he wanted her all the same. Wanted her like hell despite what he knew she could do. Despite it.

And because of it.

"No need for ze rush, Commander," Sandrine said. "You can have one more little drink, yes?"

"Yes," he said. "Yes I will yes yes."


End file.
